Experience

Snowed In Studios

Oct 2015 - Current

My Role

I work as a Lead Programmer & Senior Software Engineer at Snowed In Studios, serving multiple teams. This has me working about %50 in a leadership, management and HR context across a few teams. The other half of my time is spent engineering between projects for Hangar 13 and Eidos Montreal.

My role changes a lot month to month. Some of my responsibilities include:

Recruiting, screening and testing programmers.

Code reviewing for teams headed by non-technical managers.

Building estimates for project proposals.

Engineering and writing for SR&ED.

Organizing fun studio events.

Technology

I specialize in C++ development surrounding gameplay and engine work. As a hobbyist I taught myself web and server development, enabling me to help our studio adopt more modern practices in these areas as well. I'm a competent Unity developer, and do use this skill at Snowed In, but would consider this skill secondary to my experience in C++ engine and game development.

There's no engine that we use "the most" at Snowed In. I work on client projects which requires me to jump between various proprietary engines, Unity and Unreal frequently.

Hangar 13 Mandates

June 2017 - Present

I'm currently working as lead programmer and team lead for an unannounced game by Hangar 13 (a 2K studio). This outsourcing mandate involves writing a compiler for a visual scripting language that will generate C++ then native binaries. The compiler we're developing is written in C++ using their proprietary game engine. Other aspects of this mandate span more game-specific editor features I can't disclose, but is focused in their content authoring and editor UI to support these features.

Eidos Montreal Mandates

April 2018 - Present

I'm working as lead programmer and team lead for an unannounced game by Eidos Montreal (a Square Enix company). My team is being mandated to improve some in-house tools being used on multiple games, as well as improve editor UI. The mandate is intended to expand into rendering and engine development over time as we ramp up.

ROKH - Nvizzio

April 2017 - June 2017

On Rokh I worked as a programmer to help Nvizzio close tasks before their greenlight early access. I spent time working largely on UI and Gameplay related tasks and bugs. Rokh is developed in Unreal Engine 4 using C++.

Warner brothers montreal mandates

May 2015 - March 2016

I worked as lead programmer and team lead for the better part of a year on an unannounced project for Warner Brothers Games. Our mandate was AI focused, and utilized C++ in a heavily modified Unreal Engine 3. I spent most of my time focusing on the interactions between fast moving and slow moving AI actors, and specializing AI behaviour for a rich experience in the game world.

Other Projects

In between and sometimes in parallel with the projects above I've been working on a number of other projects for the studio. I've notably worked as lead programmer on the PS4 port of Hyper Hippo's successful mobile game Adventure Capitalist, Nickelodeon's Henry Danger: Crime Warp, several of PBS Kids games and an internal level editor for HTML5 games.

Ubisoft Montreal

April 2013 - Sept 2015

My Role

I worked for 2.5 years at Ubisoft Montreal as a Generalist Programmer. I worked entirely with in-house engines in C++ and focused mostly on the systems that support game UI and game interfaces themselves. I was known for my experience in debugging, optimization and my deeper-than-average language expertise.

For Honor

September 2014 - September 2015

I spent a year with the team on For Honor, taking the game from an unannounced pre-alpha into player hands for a public beta. I joined the UI team in October 2014 as a Generalist Programmer and developed UI systems for handling popups and our single player and mission UI. I worked with the other developers on our team to help implement game mode UI's and menus while maintaining the systems I developed to enable the development of these features.

Shape Up

April 2014 - September 2014

On this 6 month mandate I worked mostly solo to take care of our first contact on Shape Up. The first contact is the first 10 minutes every player experiences that will teach them about the game world through tutorials. I developed tools for our designers to manipulate the introduction flow, and spent time developing and integrating content for this experience.

Watch Dogs

April 2013 - April 2014

As a generalist programmer I worked primarily to optimize 3D aspects of the UI for performance and memory, I also worked to create some new menus and hud elements. One of the larger areas I worked on was the Indicators. In Watch Dogs, indicators are 3D hud elements that can show what you can hack and the progress of your hack, GPS waypoints, mission objectives, item pickups and areas of interest. There were in total over 30 unique indicator types that all behaved slightly differently and often had unique needs for memory pooling and audio-visual feedback.

Magmic

March 2012 - April 2013

Role

Magmic is known for some of the best games on Blackberry. After shipping the Blackberry 10 operating system at QNX software systems, I joined Magmic to work as a programmer and offer what insights I could on the development process for this brand new blackberry platform. Over time I worked on our multi-platform titles and maintained our open source game engine across used our products.

Projects

Brand IP

Magmic IP

QNX Software Systems

April 2011 - March 2012

Role

I worked as a programmer at QNX software systems to help in the development of the BB10 operating system that's now running on all modern blackberry phones.

Using C and OpenGL:ES I worked with 2 others to develop the home screen and title bar for the system across all devices. Specifically I was responsible for folders on the home screen, the title bar and text rendering.